CONSERVATIVE PARTY CONFERENCE 2016: Housing minister Gavin Barwell has strongly hinted he will allow councils to raise planning fees.
Current planning application fees have not been raised since 2011, leaving some councils to rack up deficits in their underresourced planning departments and struggle to retain staff.
Speaking at a fringe event at the Conservative Party Conference, he said: “I said I wasn’t going to make any announcements so I tried in my speech to indicate a degree of sympathy with that argument.”
He added: “I don’t think we are going to move to a model where we just let councils charge whatever they wish to charge. But, we are sympathetic that there is a problem.
“This is one of the very rare issues where nearly everyone I talk to agrees. So whether you talk to developers, or councils, or planning officials, everyone is agreed there is a problem. Lots of developers do say, ‘I’d quite happily pay a premium charge if I got a premium service in return for it’.”
Barwell said if he allows councils to raise planning fees, they will have to guarantee that the extra fees will be reinvested into resourcing the planning department.
“I would want an assurance from the councils concerned that every single penny that they raised from the extra fees would be spent on additional spending in planning departments,” he said.
A new planning package would be linked to improvement and “designation due”, Barwell said.
“At the moment all we are really measuring there is performance on major applications,” he said. “But actually I am interested in performance on minor applications, I am interested in how quickly s106 gets done… So you’d want to look at overall performance across the system.”
Speaking after the event, Baroness Scott, leader of Wiltshire Council, said: she would support a fee increase.
She said: “To have a little bit more money in the system – I am very happy for it to be ring-fenced for planning – would help us a great deal. First of all to retain those good officers that we’ve got – that know the area, that can get the planning out very quickly and speedily. But also to employ a few more so we haven’t got the backlogs that tend to build up at this time in a housebuilding programme.”
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